A blog about how paintings, photographs, and prints have helped me visualize my fiction—both Where the Light Falls and works-in-progress—with a hope that they will stimulate other writers and readers, too.

A small sample of the images that inspired me appears below. Click on these or any images in the posts to see enlargements. In the text, click on colored words to activate links.

Picturing a World

The American Civil War (1861-1865) has deeply affected the psyches of Cousin Effie and Edward; and as soon as I learned in my background reading that Carolus-Duran fought in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), I knew a shared experience of war could be an overt point of contact between him and Edward. Read More

I have sent you a separate message via the web site - but I would be very keen to know the source of your comment " learned in my background reading that Carolus-Duran fought in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871)". I am trying to detail his life during this period. I know that he was living in Brussels in April 1871..but want to know more regarding him in the war.

thanks

Paul

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Paul

December 29, 2016 4:34 AM EST

I apologize for not responding to your e-mail. The website mailbox relegated it to the spam folder and is refusing to open it!

I put a lot of what I learned into pp. 381–384 of Where the Light Falls. Briefly, Carolus-Duran served in the 7th Company of the 19th Battalion of the National Guard throughout the Siege of Paris. It was a company made up almost entirely of artists from the Notre-Dame-des Champs neighborhood of Paris and was posted to Bastion 84. The men would go home to their families at night. Immediately upon the ceasefire in 1871, Carolus-Duran applied for a passport and took his wife, mother, daughter, and sister to Brussels.

A terrific English-language source is Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under the Siege (1870–71), University of Chicago Press (2002).

Blog Tip! From a post at The History Blog, I’ve just learned about a million 17th, 18th, and 19th C images released by the British Library to its Flickr account. The view of the Appian Way shown here reminds me of the countryside around Rome that Edward and Carl would have seen. If you have ideas about how to use the new release or find an image that strikes your fancy in any way, please share your thoughts and discoveries! Read More

From the time I started writing, Sargent’s painting of a couple strolling in the Luxembourg Garden was a key image for me. Edward and Jeanette. The fountain. The fashion silhouette of the woman’s dress (no bustle). Touches of red. Light. Read More

After a hard morning of research in Paris, the omelette was fantastic!

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John

December 16, 2015 5:30 AM EST

How did you find this spot? We have a print of JSS's "A Walk in the Luxembourg Gardens" and are going to Paris next year. I would LOVE to be in the exact spot where this painting takes place. Thank you.

Katherine's reply: It's very easy. It's in the plaza with a big pond and fountain right in front of the Palais de Luxembourg. The couple are headed toward the palace, though it does not appear in the painting. Have a wonderful time!

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Elaine Homestead

December 16, 2015 7:01 AM EST

Hi Katherine,WOW!! I am sooo impressed with the swiftness and preciseness of your response. We will easily find this place. Thank you again. EH

Gardening history is one of my hobbies, and I enjoyed giving Edward a pleasure I would dearly love to have had, namely, coming across a single illustration from Leonhart Fuchs’ illustrated herbal of 1542 at a stall by the river Seine.

Edward feels confident in buying it partly because of what he has learned from a Read More

While I was writing, the concept of "the male gaze” seemed more pertinent to feminist art history than to my novel. What made me chortle gleefully when I first saw At the Café by Forain was not the trio of repellent oglers, but that blue dress on the Parisiénne. Wouldn’t Jeanette love to see herself in it! Wouldn’t she love the hat! Let’s face it, she might even have enjoyed attracting the notice of strangers (she does want to be a star). But surely not these strangers: Edward was right to be dubious about the milieu and the people depicted. Read More

I had Jeanette and Edward react to Mary Cassatt’s Portrait of a Little Girl at the 4th Impressionist Exhibition for several reasons. First and obviously, it fell in with a focus on women painters. Second, the tilting of the picture plane, influenced by Japanese woodcuts, was an important upending of pictorial convention at the time, and I wanted to show how the older Edward could in some ways be more open to the avant-garde than a typical art student like Jeanette who was invested in the prevailing conventions at the very time they were about to fall. Read More

Whether Pissarro's Turkeys hung in the 4th Impressionist show (1879) or not, Caillbotte's Man Docking His Skiff certainly did. Because I had the good luck to see it in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and could examine the actual weave of the canvas and brushstrokes it went onto a short list of paintings for my characters to see, too. What fires the imagination is what matters the most in writing fiction. Read More

Monet’s Impression: Sunrise is the iconic one, the quintessential example of rapid brushwork used to capture a moment painted out of doors. I knew from The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 (2 vols.; 1996) that it hung at the 4th Impressionist exhibition (April 10–May 11, 1879), but I chose not to mention it specifically during my characters’ visits to the show because other paintings served my thematic and narrative purposes more pointedly. For this blog, however, what better to pair with the study in the previous post? Read More

In the 1870’s, the small river Bièvre, which is now paved over within Paris, carried the waste of tanneries, leather factories, paper mills, and other noisome industries. Edward crosses it when he goes to help Effie at a McCall Mission clinic.

The McCall Mission was a Protestant missionary group. When I first ran across a reference to it in a published diary of sculptor Lorado Taft from his days as a student in Paris, I almost whooped with glee in the library. Now, I knew what Cousin Effie did with her spare hours!

When he returns to Paris from Rome, Edward sublets an apartment on the Right Bank in a new, comfortable district of straight boulevards, harmonious architecture, and no haunting history. Some critics claim that painters of urban modernity in the last quarter of the 19th C depicted alienation and emptiness. They would call your attention to how far Caillebotte’s solitary viewer is removed from the street. But to me, standing as he is at ease above a boulevard lined with trees and handsome buildings, the man suggests Edward: alone perhaps, yet content to contemplate the gifts of civilization and peace in contrast to the horrors of war.

For a street-level view by Caillebotte of the same sort of neighborhood (and solitary man), click here. Read More